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HeavyEyed talks protagonist death, DLC, marketing, and why tragedy works in video games in The Tragedy of Mass Effect. Megan Farokhmanesh speaks to ArenaNet employees about their reactions to co-worker firings and other developers about how it impacted them, John Teasdale discusses how language is used to dissuade his fans from becoming the person he was when he was young, and Adrian Hon talks about injured sovereigns and the absurdity of siding with corporations for the imagined bought servility of their employees. Kimberly Koenig writes about gaming in Ecuadorian fishing village Santa Marianita, Patrick Klepek on the dad that stole his son's Steam account, Will Partin tells the story of Starcraft 2's history as an Esport, Darksiders 3 gameplay, Mark Brown begins series on accessibility design, Mafia 3 developer on how diversifying your team protects you from blind spots and the opening they cut, Jayson starts up Angry Army Weekly again, Rene Haase on how Dark Souls 3 acts as a homage to the ideals and theories behind romanticism, Epic gives Unreal asset creators a raise and back pay, Disney to air Overwatch League, and more.

And we're back! I honestly didn't want to cover this story, but it just kept going. As things are still happening, I won't be talking about the fallout that has ensued in the time between the firings and now. There is more to come next week.

InXile Entertainment’s The Bard’s Tale IV wears its heart on its sleeve: Starting a new game throws you into a full-motion video cutscene of four actual human people – two of them equipped with obviously fake elf ears – sitting in front of what looks like the interior of a hand-painted inn. Three of the actors listen intently as the fourth plays a small harp, introducing them to the story of the game you’re about to play. The whole thing is drenched in a warm sepia tone, and at the cutscene’s close, the actors tense up as if they’re turning back into a still image. It’s weird and awkward, but charming.

Since watching 50 minutes of Cyberpunk 2077 gameplay at E3, Johnny has been swotting up on Cyberpunk 2020 to see how similar CD Projekt Red's game is to the tabletop role playing game. In this video, you can learn about character creation, the fluid class system and how similar Cyberpunk 2077 is to Cyberpunk 2020

But not everyone is enthralled with it. William Gibson helped to invent cyberpunk with his 1984 novel Neuromancer - its gritty depiction of a plugged-in future was a revelation, winning it a slew of literary prizes and resulting in more than six million sales to date. Gibson wasn’t impressed with Cyberpunk 2077’s E3 2018 trailer. He made this clear by taking to Twitter to say that it “strikes me as GTA skinned-over with a generic 80s retro-future.” Ouch.

A similar sentiment comes from Bruce Sterling, one of Gibson’s fellow cyberpunk founders, who says he can “admire the technical quality of that trailer,” but reckons “it’s got the same problem that DC and Marvel movies have.” By which he means it’s too glossy, too interested in being pretty, and doesn’t do anything new.

Everything old is new again, and everything once overlooked by publishers is cool once more. Today, publisher Kalypso Media (Sudden Strike, Tropico, Dungeons et al) went and bagged themselves the rights to all of Pyro Studios’s old games, which means the entire Commandos series of stealthy tactical puzzlers. Better still, the publisher has already confirmed that new games in the series are on the way, as well as “an extensive adaptation” of the older games to current systems, which sounds like remasters to me.

MS-DOS, the text-based operating system people used to use before Windows took over the planet, was how PC games were played in ancient times. It’s been dead for decades, but one developer figures 2018 is as good a time as any to make a brand new game for it.

Tether is a game about terraforming Mars. Not for Elon Musk “because I have something to prove” reasons, but because the Earth is dying and the Moon got blown up. You know, it’s surprising that Moon doesn’t get blown up more. It doesn’t do anything except regulate the tides and it’s always just up there… taunting us… and we have so many missiles… Shut up, ya dumb moon! So back to Tether. It’s a cool looking game first-person game about memory and loss and terror based in the mental pressures of deep space isolation. Or at least it was a cool looking game. It’s been placed on an indefinite hold, and that appears to be a real loss.

Earlier this week the Battlefield V development team released a blog post chock full of information about what they learned from the game’s recent closed alpha. It also contained a couple beautiful heat maps.

Battlefield V’s closed alpha was largely a hit, though it left fans with one big question: when’s the open beta release date? This September, DICE says, one month before the game is set for full release. You can also expect a further set of limited opportunities to play the game ahead of release, following up on the invite-only closed alphas.

A playthrough of the Phoenix Point - Backer Build Two pre-alpha. Phoenix Point is the latest turn-based tactical combat and strategy game by X-Com creator, Julian Gollop. Phoenix Point is currently in development with an expected release window of June 2019 on Windows, Linux, Mac and Xbox One

Creative Assembly has a history of not-so-subtle teases for upcoming games, and this time it’s Total War: Warhammer III - and more specifically, the addition of a new Chaos faction. The new game is still in the throes of pre-production, but the team is confident enough to offer a quick hint about what to expect.

Nelke & the Legendary Alchemists: Ateliers of the New World is coming to North America and Europe in both physical and digital formats for PlayStation 4 and Switch, and for PC via Steam this winter, publisher Koei Tecmo announced.

The world is in ruins. Only a remnant of mankind remains, hunted to near extinction by horrors from another world. As one of the few survivors left, you will venture into portals to fantastic realms to gather the resources and firepower needed to fight back and retake what was lost.

Pillars of Eternity II is already a brave sequel - it pulls the series away from its nostalgic roots in the temperate woodland of Baldur’s Gate, and replants it in the Southern-Pacific-style island chains of the Deadfire Archipelago. That displacement had a knock-on effect on the rest of the game, which reimagined the isometric RPG as a swashbuckling adventure.

The Council is an adventure game infused with RPG mechanics and some interesting narrative decisions. It started strong, but faltered a bit with the more puzzle-oriented second episode, Hide and Seek. Its third episode, Ripples, arrives July 24th.

One of the biggest changes Forsaken will bring to Destiny 2 is the arrival of nine new supers. Come September 4, players will be able to not only choose which subclass they like best, but which super under each subclass best fits their playstyle, leading to more options in PvE and more engaging encounters in PvP.

No Man's Sky's NEXT update is its "largest update so far", so reckoned developer Hello Games earlier this year. It's due next week—Tuesday, July 24—and has a new trailer. Feast your eyes on that above first, and we'll discuss what's new below.

The release date for Hollow Knight’s Gods & Glory update is scheduled for next month, bringing a whole host of fresh content to celebrate “final chapter for the knight.” Developer Team Cherry says this is the biggest update to the game yet, and has provided a new trailer with a taste of what to expect.

Middle-earth: Shadow of War came out on October 10, 2017. Two hundred eighty days later, it is now free of all microtransactions. It’s a drastic change and yet another sign that 2017 was a turning point for the video game industry’s brief obsession with loot boxes.

"I feel like a dick, but I used this to my advantage earlier today," said Reddit user, Rook_Boi. "In a ranked game I typed in chat 'don't be racist', and an enemy got instantly kicked because I baited him into typing something racist."

Overwatch just got a bundle of new features aimed at curbing toxicity, and it seems those additions have already been successful in combating poor player behaviour. Since the addition of the new social features last month, data analysts at Blizzard have found big drops in abusive chat.

Everyone liked Fries, says one developer, adding that even fans in the Guild Wars 2 subreddit echoed this sentiment. His firing has had a particularly strong “chilling effect in the studio,” says another current employee. “I think this is blood in the water for the worst kind of people, and not just the ones who run around screaming slurs at people on social media and brigading studio HR departments, but YouTubers with 50K+ subscribers who fearmonger about SJWs,” they tell The Verge. “And if ArenaNet wants to rebuild its reputation with the most marginalized in the industry (ironically enough, Jessica was probably one of our biggest cheerleaders for how good our diversity was), it will start by acknowledging that.”

You might not work in the gaming industry but you should care about anyone being fired because hypersensitive “customers” used their energy against a target. With the ubiquity of the internet, anyone can target you. Thus the first reason you should care: It can happen to you or someone you love: angry people with too much time on their hands should not be empowered to take jobs away.

There are two curiosities here, the first being the minute nature of Price’s supposed offence. Even if you consider her comments to be exceptionally rude, why should rude comments cause such an uproar? We are not short of famous individuals who are far ruder, far more frequently. For those who are fond of throwing around accusations of overreaction amongst ‘snowflakes’, a few sharp tweets seem exceptionally small beer. Even the subject of her comments, Deroir, did not seem especially hurt at the time, and did not seek any redress – instead, it was others who came to defend his honour.

The second curiosity has been the active pursuit of any journalist or, indeed, individual who would dare to defend Price. But Price has been fired! Surely ‘justice’ has been done and the matter is over. Yet clearly there is something so dangerous about Price’s actions that they require an overwhelming repudiation, such that even her sympathisers must be challenged and punished.

Vida Starcevic, community manager at Alan Wake and Quantum Break developer Remedy, told Kotaku in email that the studio used to take a reactive approach to social media, but has recently begun encouraging developers to be more active on their personal accounts in order to show that “a studio is its people.” In the wake of Price and Fries’ firings, Starcevic said she started an internal dialogue aimed at nailing down the specifics of a social media policy that protects employees.

The universe has a few constants. You’re going to die, you have to pay taxes, and if you sell something on someone else’s platform, you have to give them a 30 percent cut. Well, publisher Epic Games is disrupting that last fundamental truth with its Unreal Engine Marketplace, as it’s planning to only take a 12 percent cut of any assets sold through its platform. That leaves a massive 88 percent for developers.

Earlier this year, 120 people were arrested in China for alleged connection in either designing or making PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds cheat tools. Then, in late April, another 15 were nabbed. Now the current arrest total is reportedly 141 alleged cheaters.

Ken Lord used to be a Star Citizen super fan. Once upon a time, he helped fund Roberts Space Industries’ endless maiden voyage with $4,500 of his own money. Now, after years of delays and changes, he wants out. RSI didn’t get back to him, and he sued. It didn’t go his way.

Aliens: Colonial Marines isn’t a great game. It was plagued by a troubled development, and Kotaku’s official review flatly called the game “awful.” However, a modder has discovered a critical spelling error in the game files that might be responsible.

Konami has flexed its legal muscles and quashed an ambitious attempt by an enthusiastic 17-year-old fan to remake Hideo Kojima's PlayStation 4 micro horror masterpiece PT for PC - but, in a surprisingly positive twist, has seemingly offered an internship in the process.

For a game that never released and a Playstation-only demo for said game that now un-exists, there’s been a sudden rush of (mostly) good news regarding Silent Hills on PC. No, not for the game itself, because that ship has long since sailed. But if you were enraptured by the spirit of the whole hullabaloo, there’s a lot of neat bonus projects suddenly at your disposal.

Capcom was nice enough to release an HD version of Resident Evil 4 back in 2014. It’s on Steam and such, but it only really updated the textures of some stuff and not all the stuff, so a team of dedicated fans has spent the last few years picking up the slack. The Resident Evil 4 HD Project has two co-leads that keeps updating this personal endeavor, and a near-finished product is finally available. To show off the work done, we’ve got some texture comparison video. Incidentially, I’ve come to really love these, because I did not realized I cared this much about how bottles on wine looked on a shelf or how a particular set of shadows falls but oh god I REALLY DO.

NYXL support player Sung-hyeon “JJonak” Bang is a monster. He came out of nowhere during Overwatch League’s inaugural season and single-handedly redefined the way people perceive peace-loving robo-monk Zenyatta, transforming him into a lightning-handed murder machine. The league has just awarded him as its first-ever “MVP,” but what’s weird is, we haven’t seen him play as much as many other players.

Blizzard just scored a big win for its e-sports title Overwatch as the game publisher and Disney announced Wednesday that the Overwatch League will be airing on Disney’s family of networks. That includes several ESPN channels, Disney XD and ABC.

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive will once again return to Poland, after Valve confirmed that the first of next year’s major tournaments will be held by ESL in the country. The world's best teams - 24 to be precise - will flock to IEM Katowice to win a lion’s share of $1,000,000 prize pool in front of thousands of people.

Laws aimed at illegal gambling have long prevented Japanese esports events from offering cash prizes, but the country is looking to change that through a licensing program that exempts some players from those very laws.

This week, esports host Frankie Ward won “Presenter of the Year” at the UK Esports Awards, and she used her acceptance speech to make a pledge: “There is no room for homophobic or racist or misogynist language in the esports industry.” Her pledge follows on the heels of a week-long debate among esports stars and commentators about the word “faggot,” sparked by former CS:GO pro Mohamad “m0E” Assad getting a temporary Twitch ban for using the slur.

Crowdfunding News (not sharing everything I find, just ones that look interesting, have known talent behind them, and a chance to succeed)

When John Hopstead first descended into the virtual world of Dark Souls in 2013, his mission was to save a decaying world. Famed for its brutal and exacting gameplay, Dark Souls is a popular game to live stream: if you’re going to die hundreds of times, you might as well perish with some digital company to lighten the mood. What Hopstead didn’t know then was that this would be the start of an even more difficult journey to make connections with other people. Hopstead has been streaming to largely nobody for the last five years, and he’s not alone in this pursuit.

What follows is several excerpts from Braving Britannia: Tales of Life, Love, and Adventure in Ultima Online (http://www.bravingbritannia.com). In addition to speaking with dozens of players about their experiences in the grandfather of MMOs, the book features interviews with several of the game’s early programmers, designers, and producers, including Chris Mayer (Fallout 76), Raph Koster (Star Wars Galaxies), Starr Long (Shroud of the Avatar), Gordon Walton (Crowfall), Rich Vogel (DOOM), and others.

In a poorly-lit corner of a former Polish wedding venue in Brooklyn, New York, Giovanni “ShinG” Nieves took a screwdriver to a GameCube controller as a crowd of customers waited. Nieves, in a red bomber jacket and a fade haircut, was reverse-engineering a Super Smash Bros. 4 competitor’s controller at a tournament called Smash Sounds. Under its shell, Nieves was picking at a screw with a screwdriver. He says he picked up a clean $700 that weekend modding, repairing and refurbishing GameCube controllers.

It’s been five years since Dead Space 3 came out, and a lot has happened since then. After Dead Space 3’s disappointing sales, EA pulled studio Visceral off the franchise and assigned them to Battlefield Hardline. Then it was on to a Star Wars project that was eventually cancelled. Finally, Visceral itself got the axe, and its former employees have had to find new jobs in the industry.

It’s been almost 7 years since I quit my last job. Back in 2011 I was a freshly baked postgraduate in Melbourne. I was entering my 30's and the indie game renaissance was in full swing. When my contract ended I decided to leave academia and pursue my own path in game development. I then began working on a game called Moonman. Fast forward some long years and that game, now called MoonQuest, has just been released on Steam Early Access and itch.io.

There is a certain class of books (Understanding Comics, The Design of Everyday Things) that aren’t ostensibly about video games, but have still found their way into the informal game design canon. Having recently read Thinking in Systems: A Primer by Donella Meadows, I believe it also deserves a spot on that list. The book covers a wide range of tools and methods for systems thinking, but I’d like to focus on one technique in particular and how it could apply to game design.

While all of these are all certainly important components of the effect produced by Doki Doki Literature Club (DDLC), there is a massive topic missing from the conversation around how it crafts such a uncanny impact on its players. Perhaps DDLC’s most radical maneuver is treating the whole screen as a site for the construction of compelling images. As the game progresses, the facade of reality increasingly breaks down with user interface (UI) elements fracturing and repeating, character assets zooming off the edges of the screen to near-abstraction, washes of pixelated static, fractured image assets mixing together, and garbled dialog that spilling beyond its frames. These visual breakages work together to imply an unsteady world, one in which every pixel on the screen has the potential to be active in ways that are very rare in other video games.

The Dark Souls series by Hidetaka Miyazaki of FromSoftware, Inc. are a series of Japanese video games set within a medieval dark fantasy setting. The games heavily draw upon the aesthetics of western historical art movements. Miyazaki and designers from FromSoftware have gained a reputation among video game critics for linking to tell the story of their games in a minimalistic fashion, not through text or dialogue, but through the environments, and in specific the designs found within the game itself. The series brings to light many philosophical issues such as the value of life, death, and nihilism

Mass Effect 3 has one of, if not the most, controversial ending is all of games. But why was that? With this video I wanted to take a look at tragic story telling in games and why it doesn't always land, looking through one of gamings most heated ends.

An in-depth analysis/critique of the inFamous series, including inFamous (2009), inFamous 2 (2011), inFamous: Festival of Blood (2011), inFamous: Second Son (2014) and inFamous: First Light (2014), all developed by Sucker Punch Productions and published by Sony for PlayStation 3/4.

Video games are for everyone. But disabled people can be left out if developers don’t consider their needs.

In this series of videos, I’ll be sharing guidelines and best practices for making games more accessible to a wide range of disabilities. Starting with auditory options, for the deaf and hard of hearing.

The final episode of Mega Man 11’s ‘making of’ series of videos talked about sound design and sound effects, and midway through the video a sneak peek into the sound effects room was shown, which has now gotten its own ‘gaiden’ video.

An enterprising soul has designed a calculator from rollercoasters using Rollercoaster Tycoon 2’s creative toolset. YouTube user Marcel Vos posted the above video demonstrating the calculator in action, which uses a pair of trains running along a labyrinthine track setup to input two numbers and output the resulting calculation.

Things I found entertaining throughout the week relating to the game industry

Amy Hennig and Mark Cerny are both 53 years old, and they attended the University of California at Berkeley at the same time. And while they both have achieved great things during their careers in video games, they haven’t crossed paths that often.

The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit, a free teaser-ish game released to generate interest in the upcoming Life Is Strange 2, wastes absolutely no time getting to the point in its short run time. Beer cans litter the house, the father is constantly lamenting the difficult situation they exist in “without mom”, our young main character has suspicious bruises on his arm; you know from the get-go exactly what kind of story is being told. Almost immediately I felt a wave of exhaustion come over me as I tried to make my way through it – it’s not that I don’t want people telling stories about abuse, nor do I particularly hate Captain Spirit itself – it’s just that this narrative is, at this point, a very familiar and very tiring part of the video game narrative landscape. God of War, Detroit: Become Human, and A Way Out (and probably a few more) have all just this year tried to tell stories about fathers acting badly when mom’s gone, and many of them are poorly thought out or downright offensively written. The problems I have with the story told by Captain Spirit are not necessarily unique to Spirit itself, but rather are perpetuated in the environment it exists in.